Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Bumbling Obama: ATMs Are to Blame for My Miserable Economic Record

He's just too pathetic for words at this point, using anything and everything as an excuse for his horrible performance in office.

Note while coming up with his absurd claim the spread of ATMs has cost jobs (more to follow on that), he also claims to have "created" two million jobs. Oh, really?

Twenty-eight months after Congress passed President Obama’s signature economic stimulus law, and nearly one year after he declared the summer of 2010 to be “Recovery Summer,” 1.9 million fewer people are employed.

In February 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that 141.7 million people were employed. By the end of May 2011 – the last month for which data are available – that number had fallen to 139.8 million, a difference of 1.9 million.

While the number of people with jobs has increased slightly from its low point during the recession – 137.9 million in December 2009 – those 1.9 million jobs have been lost despite $800 billion in stimulus spending.

Of course the reporterette probably has no idea about this so naturally there's no follow-up.

As to the ATM claim, compare the number of bank teller jobs now to back in 1985.

At the dawn of the self-service banking age in 1985, for example, the United States had 60,000 automated teller machines and 485,000 bank tellers. In 2002, the United States had 352,000 ATMs - and 527,000 bank tellers.

Meanwhile, Obama does want to make some structural changes to the economy that will destroy very good paying jobs in the energy sector. If his clean energy-win-the-future-regulate-carbon proposals were implemented, it would throw vast numbers of people out of work in the coal, oil and gas industries. And there’s zero reason to believe that the “green jobs” he would replace them with would be better paying. And, we’d all pay more for more expensive energy, either as consumers or as taxpayers footing the bills for subsidies.

Having never worked in the private sector of made a payroll, Obama is fundamentally incapable of understanding that the proliferation and convenience of ATMs actually increases productivity.

Is every 20 or 30 ATMs roughly equivalent to one bank office that doesn’t need to be built, and staffed with human tellers? It doesn’t really work that way. ATMs increase the productivity of the existing bank staff. If they didn’t exist, the banks wouldn’t be making a lot of big investments in bricks, mortar, and tellers. Instead, people would drive further to get their money, spend more time standing in line, and arrange their affairs so they didn’t have to go to the bank as often. If you’re not old enough to remember what that was like, watch movies from the 60s and 70s, and look for scenes set in banks.